Understanding Your Soul – Part 9
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 529 aired on October 25, 2015
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes, please stay with me. It’ll be a time of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of
education, but never any manipulation because we don’t have hidden agendas. We are not an
infomercial. We are not trying to sell you anything. We’re not trying to hustle you. This show is
about giving you accurate information, not useless human speculation, but accurate information
and this information always comes from the canon of Scripture, the Bible. Yeah, I know, it’s a
show about the Bible but not the kind of show you hear normally. This is no ranting, no raving,
and no jumping up and down. This is simply me giving you some accurate information, helping
you to verify and identify the plan of God for your life. If you can do this then you can orient and
adjust to the plan. Now, that’s up to you but my job is to be accurate, to get it right, to be logical,
not nonsensical, and so we’re not here to play games. There’s enough games going on in this
world today, political games of intrigue, all sorts of social games, people jockeying for position
trying to get an advantage. This group wants that, this group wants that, and I tell you it’s pitiful
and we’re all tired of seeing it. What are our choices? What are our objectives? As we go through
this study, I’ve been trying to remind you that you are a living soul. The invisible immortal part
of you is called your soul and we’ve done several lessons on this on our show The FLOT Line.
We’ve written a book on the soul called
Understanding Your Soul.
This book is free for the
asking. All you have to do is contact us. These are provided by the grace of God. I’ve always
believed as my pastor taught me years ago, if God’s in it, God will pay for it. This show The
FLOT Line is how to equip your soul. FLOT stands for the forward line of troops and it’s a
military analogy. We’re using a military metaphor here to explain how you can establish 10
unique problem-solving devices as a FLOT line of your soul. If you learn these 10 problem-
solving devices they will act as a defensive barrier and they will stop the outside sources of
adversity before they ever become the inside sources of stress. If you don’t learn them, if you try
to handle the adversity of life in your own human viewpoint thinking, your own human
mechanics, you will fail miserably. You will go into stress-related sin such as worry, fear,
implacability, bitterness, hatred, vindictiveness, these are all mental attitude sins. You can get
into these real easy and they will destroy you.
We have the capacity to destroy ourselves
starting with what we think. If we don’t think right then we’re not going to do right.
Proverbs 23:7 says, “
As a man thinketh in his heart so he is.”
You have two options. You can
think divine viewpoint, in other words what the Bible says or you can think human viewpoint
and this is what your dear old grandmother says, or your friend you work with, or the lady in the
newspaper? Divine viewpoint comes from the Bible and this is where we try to give you the
information to understand this. The Christian life is a very unique life. It’s a powerful life and it’s
a way to live without worrying. It’s a way to live without being stressed out. It’s a way to live
with no fear, no bitterness, no revenge motivation, but it is a life that must be learned. See, you
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have a couple of assets. You have a Bible, God has made sure that you have the canon of
Scripture called the Bible. You also have according to Ephesians 1:12-13 the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit. If you take the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and also use the Bible, then you have
your two operating assets. Now God has designed a plan where you can learn the Bible. It is not
for you to take your Bible and go out and sit under an oak tree at lunch and read it. Yes, you’re
going to get some divine viewpoint, but the Bible is a textbook and it’s designed to be taught to
you by a qualified pastor. According to Ephesians 4:17 God has equipped certain men with the
gift of pastor-teacher and their job is to study and teach God’s Word. Paul said they will make
you rich by giving you a treasure of divine viewpoint in your soul. It’s what you think. God the
Holy Spirit will show you how to spend this treasure glorifying God to the max. As you sit under
a well-qualified pastor and you’re filled with the Holy Spirit and that’s problem-solving device
#1, using rebound when you sin being sure you name your sin to God, and that pastor teaches
God’s Word, you will develop what we call Biblical divine viewpoint. You will develop grace
orientation, doctrinal orientation. You will develop a personal sense of destiny and all of these
are part of the 10 unique problem-solving devices. I know I said a mouthful, let me back it up
again. You have a Bible. You have the Holy Spirit. You have a well-qualified pastor. These are
three operating assets God gave you.
If you sit under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor
and you are filled with the Spirit and he teaches the Bible, then you’re going to develop
doctrinal viewpoint, a Biblical inventory of thinking. You’re going to change the way you
think.
This is what the Bible teaches in Romans 12:2, “
Stop thinking in terms of arrogance
beyond what you should think but think in terms of humility as God has assigned to each one of
us a standard of thinking from His Word,”
and again,
“As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”
Here’s the unique thing about our wonderful God. If He wants to check you out, He’s not looking
at where you are. He’s not looking at what you’re wearing. He’s looking at what you are thinking.
The Father has the ability to see your thoughts. Now if He can see your thoughts, He knows this
about you. He knows your motivation. He knows your intentions. He knows your desires. Let me
say it again, God the Father knows your motivations. He knows your intentions, and He knows
your desires and therefore He’s well-equipped as omniscient God, all-knowing God, to judge or
bless you based on these things.
When we talk about learning His Word it is to give you proper
motivation so that you have the right desires. This is what it’s about, so that you can have the
intentions that He wants you to have to glorify Christ to the maximum. The first mandate is,
“Let
this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus”
(Philippians 2:5). This is God’s desire for you,
to think like Christ thought, to think the same things that he thought, and what is your
motivation? To glorify God, this is why you want to do this, to bring God glory. What are your
desires? That when you get to heaven, you’re going to hear,
“Well done My good and faithful
servant”
(Matthew 25:21). You’re going to go to heaven. You believed in Jesus Christ but just
like on the football team, everybody doesn’t letter. Everybody doesn’t get in the game and it’s the
same with you. Maybe God would like to put you in the game. Maybe you do have all the assets
but you don’t know the plays. If He puts you in the game, you’re going to mess it up so He can’t
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quite use you yet.
God wants you to learn the plays. He wants you to learn the system. Then
He can put you in the game.
Then you can score the touchdowns, using this analogy, and He
can say, “Well done,” and there will be rewards for you in eternity.
Believers that never get in the
game, they do have eternal life, yes. They will spend eternity with their Father. They’re not going
to have any of those crowns to put at His feet because they never learned the program. They
never executed the plan. Hebrews 5:11-16 talks about this. We don’t really know who wrote
Hebrews but he says this,
“I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to teach you but I can’t because you
are a little dull of hearing.”
You don’t understand, you don’t want to learn, and it’s true, so many
people don’t want to take the time to learn. They’re the nod to God crowd. They’re the casual
Christian, “Hello God. Goodbye God. See you next Sunday God.” This is not the way we glorify
God. Yes, you should go to church. Yes, you should do whatever you do in church but God’s
desire is for you to grow. As 2 Peter 3:18 says,
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of your
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
and there’s only one way you can grow. 2 Timothy 2:15 says,
“Study to show thyself approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly
dividing the Word of truth.”
If you’re going to grow then you want to learn how to execute the
plan. You don’t want to be ashamed and get to heaven and find out you did all the right things in
the wrong way. Can you do the right things in the wrong way? Sure you can. You can pray and
pray and never get an answer because you do a right thing but you do it in the wrong way. You
see, if you pray out of fellowship with unconfessed sin in your life, there is not going to be an
answer because Psalm 66:18 says,
“If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord’s not going to hear
me.”
Your soul is a battlefield. It is the most important battlefield in this whole world. The
irrational thinking of sin, the irrational thinking of evil, the emotional battle that you face every
day of your life battling against the rational way of thinking which is God’s Word. The Holy
Spirit who lives in you vs. the sin nature that you received from Adam, both of these want to
control your soul.
If you surrender to sinful or evil intents of your sin nature, then like a
person on the battlefield, your soul is going to be wounded and you’re going to be out of
service.
You’re still a Christian, you’re still going to heaven, but you’re on the sidelines. If you
continue to stay on the sidelines without rebounding, without using problem-solving device #1,
then you’re going to wind up a casualty. Yep, you’ll be in heaven. Yep, you’ll have eternal life but
you’re going to arrive there not as a victorious combatant for God. You’re going to arrive there as
a battlefield casualty. How can you guard your vulnerable soul from the unrelenting attacks of
the enemy? It never stops does it?
Every day your flesh tempts you. Every day Satan tries to
distract you. Every day the world lures you. Satan is the great deceiver. The world is the
great distractor.
The flesh is the great destroyer. It’s true for any soldier, you are a spiritual
warrior and you have weapons. You have armor and part of it is what I’ve been teaching you on
these 10 unique problem-solving devices. Paul talks about some of them in Ephesians 6:11 when
he says,
“Put on the armor of God.”
There’s a military metaphor again, just like the one we are
using. You are in full-time Christian service. You might not think you are. It is not only preachers
that are in full-time Christian service.
You are in full-time Christian service because you are a
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full-time Christian. Your Lord Jesus Christ is your Commander-in-Chief and He orders
you to,
“Put on the whole armor of God,”
in Ephesians 6:11.
You can defy this and you can
walk into the devil’s arena with no armor on and you are going to be a casualty. Listen to what it
says, it’s very clear. You need to hear this and understand this.
“Finally, keep on being
strengthened in the Lord
[this is where your strength comes from]
even by means of the inner
rule of His endowed power
[this is the spiritual life given to every believer at the moment of
salvation, listen as I read on,]
Put on you for yourself the whole armor of God in order that you
may be able to hold your ground against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against
flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, rulers of darkness of this world, against spirit
forces and evil wickedness in high places. And for this reason,
[here it is]
pickup and put on the
full armor of God
[why?]
in order that you may have the ability to resist in the evil day, and
having done everything to keep standing firm against the forces of Satan”
(Ephesians 6:10-13).
This is sort of a modified expanded translation of that passage. You are in a war, it’s a war for
your thoughts. Your soul has mentality and this is where the battlefield is and this is what Satan’s
going to do. Remember, he is the great deceiver. Many Christians have been deceived into
believing doctrine that is not true. They fall in love with a person, they follow a person. They
move away from the truth and they follow this magnetic personality, this person that they’ve
come to trust and believe in. All of a sudden this person now changes his direction and says,
“You know, I don’t believe what I use to believe, but I believe this now.” Instead of having the
guts to say, “No way” they go right along with that magnetic personality. This is one way Satan
deceives us, by using people to lure us out of the system and he can deceive you as well. The
world can distract you by getting you to think, “Oh, if I could only win the lottery. Oh, if those
people only would like me. Oh, if only I had some money, I’d be happy.”
The world tells you
that happiness is related to people and circumstances and this is not true. Luke 11:28 says,
“Happiness belongs to those people who hear My Father’s Word and keep it.”
These are the
words of Jesus. So if you want to be happy it boils down to one thing, learning God’s program
and obeying God and you will have the most marvelous life you could ever imagine. You cannot
believe the things that God has for you. You say, “I have a dream and I want to be this person and
I will follow my dream.” Okay, go ahead and do that but I’m telling you your dream could never
get close to what God has in store for you. If you will let God lead you and direct your life it will
be so much greater than your dream because you may achieve your dream but you won’t be
happy. There are stories after stories of people that in human viewpoint thinking said, “If I could
just do this or just do that, I’ll be happy,” and they do it. They make a lot of money and they are
not happy because unhappy people take their unhappiness with them wherever they go. The first
step in arming your soul is to use problem-solving device #1 and this is rebound, to make sure
that you are operating in the omnipotent power of God the Holy Spirit because if you don’t, you
will be defenseless against the devious, incessant onslaught of Satan, of your sin nature, or of the
world. If you can rebound then you can take the first step by laying aside your old self. You can
let the Holy Spirit control your thinking and then you can begin to get a good perspective of
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divine viewpoint. Listen, you don’t want to play ping pong from sin to rebound, from sin to
rebound, from sin to rebound, back and forth. If you will put on that armor of God that Ephesians
6 talks about, God makes it possible for you not to be a ping pong ball. You can advance in the
spiritual life. You can live one day, two days, three days at a time, victorious, staying out of sin,
learning God’s Word, and being the happiest person the world has ever seen mainly because you
won’t be frustrated with yourself. You won’t look back at yourself and say, “If I were a Christian,
I wouldn’t have done that.” You have this guilt you carry because you fail. Let me tell you
something. There is not a one of us that hasn’t failed. There is not a one of us that should not
already be a greasy spot somewhere.
If we are alive today it’s because of the complements of
God’s grace. He’s not through with us.
He has a plan, remember this. If you’re going to stand
firm, you’ve got to wear that belt of truth Ephesians 6:14 talks about. The belt of truth, it’s the
spiritual armor, the Word of God in Ephesians 6. Put on the belt of truth, secure it in your soul. It
holds everything else together. See, without the knowledge of God’s Word then the rest of the
armor that you’re told to put on, it’s just going to lie helpless at your feet. It all connects to the
belt. Ephesians 6:14 also says put on the breastplate, that’s the breastplate of righteousness. A
breastplate can protect your vital organs, your heart, your chest, your lungs. It allows you to
survive every soul attack unscathed. God’s righteousness is your spiritual breastplate. Do you
know where you got God’s righteousness? You got it when you were saved. Remember what 2
Corinthians 5:21 says?
“He who knew no sin was made sin for us so that we may be made the
righteousness of God through Him.”
This is when you got God’s righteousness and you
understand His righteousness once you learn His Word.
When you recognize that you have the
righteousness of God given to you only because of God’s grace and His love toward you,
then hopefully you will want to show that grace to others.
His righteousness will manifest
itself coming through you in things like your thoughtfulness, things like your relaxed mental
attitude, things like recognition and respect for freedom and privacy of other members of God’s
royal family. It’s important you remember this.
“Jesus therefore was saying to the Jews who
believed in Him
[listen now],
‘If you continue to learn My Word
[Bible doctrine]
then you are
truly My disciples and you will know the truth
[Bible doctrine]
and the truth will set you
free’”
(John 8:31-32), spiritually free. You won’t be bound up with old habits, old desires, and
old burdens. There is a way to live, a new way to live called the Christian life.
When you take
God’s Word, learn it, and put it in your soul, this gives you the freedom to serve your
Commander-in-Chief, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Our spiritual life gives us the
spiritual freedom to be victorious in this angelic conflict. We can be victorious. We can advance
to victory. We can hear God say,
“Well done My good and faithful servant.”
Ephesians 6:15 also
tells you to put combat shoes on your feet. Imagine rushing into battle with bare feet, you would
be limping around with bloodied toes. You would not only be a total failure as a soldier but the
enemy would laugh at you. They would just stomp on your toes. This is exactly the pain and the
humiliation you will suffer if you go into spiritual conflict without understanding the gospel
which refers to the entire Word of God because all of God’s Word focuses on Jesus Christ, every
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bit of it. You were saved by a simple act of faith and this faith was based on a series of sacrifices
made by Jesus Christ our Lord. Once we understand these sacrifices, then we can survive the
attacks of sin and evil. Our Lord set aside His deity. He became a human. He suffered indignities
that attacked every human body and He chose to spend much time studying His Father’s Word. It
filled His soul as a man and this was what He needed to face His enemies. Remember Matthew
4:1-11 where the devil tempted Him and every time Satan tempted Him our Lord quoted
Scripture? This is exactly what we have to do, every one of us.
Have you ever wondered why
the Bible tells us very little about the first 30 years of the life of Jesus Christ? I think it’s
because He was studying His Father’s Word. He was preparing Himself for the battle. He
was victorious on the cross, victorious going to the cross.
He didn’t want to go. He said,
“Father, if it’s Your will, let this cup pass from Me”
(Matthew 26:39). This was His prayer in the
Garden of Gethsemane. But He said,
“Nevertheless, not My will but Thy will be done.”
Have you
ever prayed a prayer like this? “Father, not my will but Thy will be done.”
You might be
surprised the way your life would go if you would quit following your own desires and
submit yourself to what God desires.
Matthew 6:33 says,
“If you seek first the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, then all the things you need and want will be added to you.”
You can read
it for yourself, it’s pretty clear. Here you are, a believer in Jesus Christ and now you think you’ve
sinned so horrendously that you’re no longer saved. Well, if that’s the way you feel you’re
walking around barefooted. If you try to work for your salvation, you know like, “I’ve got to
witness to 47 people this week,” or “I’ve got to give a certain amount of money this week,”
you’re walking around barefooted. If you think that never missing church for one year means
you’re going to go to heaven, you’re walking around barefooted. Listen, you don’t have to walk
down an aisle and make Jesus Christ Lord to be saved. You believe the Lord is who He said He
is. In 1 John 5:1,
“He that believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.”
What about John
3:16?
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in
Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
What did Jesus say in John 6:29?
“This is the
will of the Father, that you believe in Me, whom He has sent.”
How do you become a Christian?
Act 16:31,
“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”
This is the victory and it’s
yours. You can believe that Jesus Christ paid for your sin, you are in the family of God, and
you’re not walking around barefooted. You have on those shoes prepared with the gospel of
peace. There is a lot to know about this, please stay with me. Until next week I’m your host Rick
Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line.